All well and good, but the submit button is a little kooky because, being an input element, it picks up all the styling rules that we just applied. It’s easy to fix this by applying a few extra CSS styles to the submit button specifically – changing the background color, maybe a rollover effect, stuff like that – and I’ve generally done this by creating a new class specifically for the styling of form buttons .

While this works perfectly well, adding class=”button” to our HTML is completely unnecesary, because we can isolate all submit buttons via CSS attributes. The syntax follows the pattern…

This can be used to isolate any HTML element you like – all forms with the method=”post” or all anchor tags with target=”_self” – anything really.

In fact now I type this out it occurs to me that the CSS selectors ‘.’ and ‘#’ (class and ID respectively) are just shorthand for the CSS attribute selectors element[class~=value] and element[id~=value] – more on the ‘~’ operator in another post.